After spending over 50 years on and around the water, I have realized that without strong fisheries laws and effective conservation measures, the future of salt water fishing, and America's living marine resources, is dim. Yet conservation is given short shrift by national angling organizations and the angling press. I hope that this blog will incite, inform and inspire salt water fishermen to reclaim their traditional role as the leading advocates for the conservation of America's fisheries.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

WE SPOKE; WILL ASMFC LISTEN?

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Striped
Bass Management Board will meet ten days from today.

In roughly 240 hours, we’ll know whether managers have taken
meaningful steps to conserve and hopefully restore the Atlantic migratory
striped bass stock, or whether they abandoned their obligation to the
public at large and chose to pander to the small minority of people who profit
from killing this public resource.

In the fractious world of the striped bass fisherman, where
any two people are as likely as not to hold three different opinions, that
level of agreement is striking—particularly when you realize that we’re not
just talking about anglers’ views, but those of commercial fishermen and
for-hire operators as well.

Things get even more remarkable when you realize that a
majority of all respondents—a little over 52%--favor the most restrictive
recreational option offered by the Management Board, a limit of one striped
bass that must be at least 32 inches long.

In a perfect world, the support for the new fishing
mortality reference points wouldn’t be too remarkable, as they represent the
best available science—which is what reasonable people would hope is being used
by the folks we entrust to manage our living marine resources.

However, as anyone who has entered the fisheries management
arena knows, it exists in a world that is neither perfect nor perfectly
rational. That unfortunate fact is
reflected in the public hearing comments as well.

At the striped bass hearings, most of the irrationality was limited
to a single event. Seven of the twelve
dissenters showed up at the hearing in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, arguing
that the reference points mandated in the new, peer-reviewed benchmark
assessment shouldn’t be adopted because

“there is no problem with striped bass abundance and the
science is flawed.”

(I always fantasize about getting all of these “the science
is flawed” types together in a room, dropping copies of the stock assessment
and the associated raw data on a table in front of them and asking them, very
politely, if they could please help us out and show just where the flaws in the
data resided—and then quickly stepping out of the way as they all roared
something bellicose and likely obscene and then rushed back to the bar for
another few beers…)

Opposition to the one-year harvest reduction was more evenly
spaced up and down the coast; on the other hand, there were clear demographic
patterns.

As Al Ristori, Striped Bass Advisory Panel member from New
Jersey notes in his
blog on nj.com,

“The commercials
didn't want any further cuts or restrictions, while the recreational
representatives were primarily in favor of reducing to a single bass at 28 inches
or 32 inches…”

What Ristori didn’t explicitly note, because they weren’t
widely represented on the Advisory Panel, was that a lot of the for-hire boats
were also opposing the single-bass bag limit and single-year harvest
reduction. But if you go through the
meeting notes, the pattern becomes pretty obvious.

Traditional “six-pack” charters, that tend to hang dead fish
on the racks by their docks when they return from an outing, largely oppose the
conservation measures that have broad support among the fishermen
themselves. Instead, they are pushing
hard for a two-fish bag limit and, in most cases, a three-year recovery.

On the other hand, fly and light-tackle guides, along with a
minority of six-pack operators, who promote a “quality fishing experience”
rather than just dead fish on the dock, have been strongly supportive of taking
the entire harvest reduction in a single year and, in the majority of cases, of
a 1-fish bag and 32-inch minimum size.
Charter operators in northern New England, where striped bass are
already scarce, or in “destination” areas such as Block Island and Nantucket,
also strongly supported conservation measures.

Such pro-conservation sentiments were shored up by the
Technical Committee, which noted that

“Reducing [fishing mortality] to the target in one year will
be more beneficial to increasing [spawning stock biomass] and protecting strong
year classes than reducing [fishing mortality] to the target in three years…”

“Although all the recreational management options achieve the
required reductions, the [Technical Committee] has greater certainty in the
percent reductions of simple management measures (e.g., changes in bag or size
limits) relative to more complex measures (e.g., slot or trophy fish options).”

In the context of the current debate, that means a one fish
bag and a minimum size of 28, 30 or 32 inches—just what almost all of the
anglers are asking for.

So it’s pretty clear what the majority of the folks who
commented on the issues want (more than 3,000 written comments submitted
outside of the public hearing process have yet to be tabulated, but there is no
reason to believe that they won't be at least as supportive of conservation
measures as the comments made at the hearings).

The science, in the form of the benchmark stock assessment,
is very clear.

“Conservation and
management measures shall be based upon the best scientific information
available,”

so we wouldn’t even be discussing whether the fishing
mortality reference points from the benchmark assessment should be
adopted. That would have been done back
in 2013.

A federal management plan would have to

“contain…conservation and management measures…which are
necessary and appropriate for the conservation and management of the fishery to
prevent overfishing and rebuild overfished stocks, and to protect, restore, and
promote
the long-term health and stability of the fishery. [emphasis added]”

And a plan governed by Magnuson would also have to

“specify objective
and measurable criteria for identifying when the fishery to which the plan
applies is overfished (with an analysis of how the criteria were determined and
the relationship of the criteria to the reproductive potential of stocks of
fish in that fishery) and, in the case of a fishery which the Council or the
Secretary has determined is approaching
an overfished condition or is overfished, contain conservation and
management measures to prevent overfishing or end overfishing and rebuild the
fishery. [emphasis added]”

“Above all, [a fisheries
management plan] must include
conservation and management measures that ensure
the long-term health and productivity of the fishery resources under
management. [emphasis added]”

That’s a pretty high standard, and it might even be
meaningful if ASMFC decisions were subject to the same sort of judicial review
that applied to federal management decisions.
But with no effective way yet found for a court to place limits on ASMFC’s
exercise of discretion, it has proved pretty meaningless in practice, even
though the Charter also clearly states that

“Conservation programs and management measures shall be
designed to prevent overfishing and maintain over time, abundant,
self-sustaining stocks of coastal fishery resources. In cases where stocks have become depleted as
a result of overfishing and/or other causes, such program shall be designed to
rebuild, restore, and subsequently maintain such stocks so as to assure their
sustained availability inj fishable abundance on a long-term basis.”

It further states that

“Conservation programs and management measures shall be based
on the scientific information available.”

However, as anyone familiar with the management plans for
winter flounder, weakfish and tautog, not to mention northern shrimp or the
southern New England stock of American lobster know, such nice words don’t really
mean a lot when management boards choose to ignore them.

And that’s largely because there is one simple sentence in
the Standards and Procedures section which says

“Social and economic impacts and benefits must be taken into
account.”

And in the real world of ASMFC management plans, when those “social
and economic impacts” collide with the scientific findings and/or the realities
of conservation, which is generally the case, the social and economic impacts end up on top, just about
every time.

They are not merely “taken into account.” They are generally the deciding factor.

But there have been exceptions.

Strong public outcry played a big role in convincing
ASMFC to place restrictions on horseshoe crab harvest, and it’s pretty likely
that it also led the Commission to eventually (after years of foot-dragging and
ignoring the problem) to impose meaningful restrictions on the harvest of
forage fish such as menhaden, shad and river herring.

So I’m not being completely naïve when I express hope that
the strong public support for cuts in striped bass harvest will compel the
Management Board to take meaningful action again.

But I’m not going to say what such action might be.

It will almost certainly represent a compromise between the
handful of extremists pushing for status quo, the minority emphasizing the short-term economic benefits of a three-year phase in of reductions and the
conservation-minded anglers who are calling for making the all harvest cuts in a
single year, and imposing nothing less than a 1-fish bag and 32-inch minimum
size on recreationally-caught stripers.